Well, not quite, though I'm sure that a lot of casual readers will interpret it that way, because people love to see bad news everywhere. As a SWTOR player since launch however, I can't help but take a different view.

Fact is, the name "customer service forum" has been a misnomer pretty much since launch, because 99% of the time no actual customer service took place in any of the threads there. Personally I suspect that Bioware may well have had plans for this forum to serve as a genuine customer service channel once upon a time, but when launch came with its two million players and oodles of bugs, they were clearly overwhelmed by the response. Given limited resources it must have made sense to focus on the more "urgent" channels such as phone support and the in-game ticket system, while letting the forums fall by the wayside. While the launch hype eventually died down, customer services suffered further cuts instead of receiving increased support, so they probably never had the manpower to actually revive the idea of providing proper help on the forums.

What the customer services forum has been for the last four years is an online support group for players who had technical trouble with the game. Whenever I had issues launching the game or logging in, my first instinct was to go to the customer services forum and check if anyone else was having problems, because if they were, there was bound to be a thread about it. When it came to certain gameplay issues, people were sometimes even able to offer useful advice: Back in 2012 I had issues with my game crashing all the time after a certain patch, and it was the customer service forum where I eventually found my solution, buried on page 55 of an even longer thread. I still don't know if Bioware ever bothered to apply an official fix for that problem.

So, what does this mean for SWTOR players? Well, we're certainly not losing any official customer support, because the forums weren't providing it in the first place. I'm confident that nobody at Bioware lost their job over this, because most of the time nobody responded to all the issues that people posted about anyway. I have no idea how good those official EA help pages are - EA's customer support doesn't exactly have a stellar reputation - but even bad customer support can't be any worse than not getting any at all. Dare I say that it might even be an improvement?

I'm not sure how well people will take to it, because I'm sure I'm not the only one who happily plays Bioware games while still avoiding their "evil overlord" EA whenever possible. To me as an MMO player it also won't feel nearly as natural to go to an EA page as it is to simply go to my game's official forums when I have a problem. (Even if I don't expect to receive support there, talking to other players about it can still be valuable.) I can easily see threads about various tech issues or "Is the server down?" type questions making an appearance in places like the general discussion forum in the future. If that happens, will Bioware be hardline enough to keep closing those threads down or will discussions like this simply continue in other sub-forums? We shall see.

The only potential downside I see is that a complete deletion of the old forum would result in the loss of a lot of accumulated knowledge and user-created fixes for a variety of problems. So I second the suggestion that they should be allowed to remain on the site as a read-only archive, at least for now.

25/09/2015

Episode VII is still almost three months away but the rising Star Wars hype levels are already palpable. The other week I went to the website of a certain homeware retailer here in the UK and they had a whole separate category on their website for Star Wars. Not that there was much in it, but it had a whole tab of its own, side by side with categories such as "home & garden" or "sports & leisure". When I walk down the street on my way to and home from work, I walk past an optician that advertises Star Wars children's glasses. It's simply everywhere.

I will admit that I'm not immune to the lure of all these ads either. The other day I actually bought a pair of pens in my local bookshop that look like lightsabers. Hey, I needed some new pens anyway, so why not go for something funky? Of course the joke was on me - while they looked amusing, they barely worked as pens even fresh out of the packaging. Disney will literally license to anyone, even someone who makes barely functioning pens. But then I should have already known that, considering all the Frozen kitchen towels I keep seeing around...

Wikipedia says that using a small version of a film poster while talking about said film can be classified as fair use. Please don't sue me, Disney! (The larger version originally comes from here.)

Anyway, I digress. The point is that a rising tide lifts all the boats, and with all this merchandise everywhere you don't really have to be a super-fan to maybe go: "Hm, Star Wars. I remember liking that at one point." And if you're a gamer, you might very well end up remembering that game called Star Wars: The Old Republic. I'm already seeing some of it around the blogosphere. Belghast has been writing about getting back into the game because of the general Star Wars feeling in the air, and other multi-MMO-bloggers like Syp or Telwyn have found themselves returning to SWTOR in anticipation of the new expansion.

I'm thinking that this should result in a healthy boost for the game's population, even without lots of marketing for SWTOR in particular, simply because Star Wars fans will be open to anything that gives them more of their favourite IP while they wait for the next film. I would really like it if EA was able to announce some really big milestone like "back to two million active players a month" as a result of this, just because they've been so cagey when it comes to talking about the game ever since its initial flop and I want to see it do well.

Of course the question is: Even if there's a spike of new and returning players caused by general Star Wars hype - how long will it last? I suppose waiting a month for the next story update might not seem so bad when you have to wait another one and a half years for Episode VIII, but not everyone might find themselves as enamoured with the universe of the Old Republic as they are with the events in the films.

Still, I'm really hoping that this will pull a whole bunch of new Star Wars fans in who may not even have tried the game before. I can't wait for people to say stuff like: "That Revan guy is a total Kylo Ren rip-off!"

The reason I don't care much about class changes in patches or even expansions is that most of the time, they are way too abstract to make much sense to me. When you tell me that companion power will now simply scale with level instead of gear, I can immediately picture a lot of practical consequences this will have on my gameplay. When you tell me that ability X will be buffed by Y percent, that sounds nice, but it doesn't really tell me what that will mean in an everyday context.

Not even hearing about entirely new abilities tends to excite me much anymore, simply because they never seem to work out as I imagined either. Apparently Commandos will get a disengage ability / backwards jump in 4.0. My first thought was that this will probably cause me to jump myself off a cliff or into an extra trash pull in no time. But in reality, I just don't know. I remember when Electro Net was introduced in 2.0, I read the tooltip and thought that being able to prevent warriors and knights from leaping at me would be amazing. In practice I never seem to get much use out of that however - instead I mostly use it to help kill Sages and Sorcs by preventing them from bubbling at the crucial moment. However, I had to actually go through many PvP matches to see the ability in action to realise how things were working out. So I figure there isn't too much point in getting excited about any of this new stuff yet either way.

If anything, I'm a little worried about what seems to be an ongoing "mobility arms race". I saw this happen in World of Warcraft when I used to play that. At first, melee was limited in range but mobile, while casters had the advantage of range but had to stand still for the vast majority of attacks. I don't know what came first anymore, but melee said they needed more gap closers, and ranged said that they needed more mobility, and more and more of such abilities were patched in until ranged was running around spamming instants and melee was leaping or teleporting all over the place. It became increasingly silly and Blizzard has been struggling to dial it back ever since.

It's not just a PvP issue either, but also leads to PvE encounters that feature a ridiculous amount of running around and twitch because there is no other way of challenging those increasingly powerful characters anymore. I fear that I'm seeing a similar thing happening in SWTOR, with ever more leaps and even more escapes, with no end in sight. I don't think that this will lead to a better game in the long run.

I also don't really like class changes all that much anyway, even though I may be in the minority here. I'd like to think that I'd be happy to play an MMO for years with my class only receiving minimal updates, as long as they kept adding new features and content to play around with. Maybe I'm wrong and I would get bored eventually. I do know however that changes to my class almost always feel like they are coming too fast. I know that many will disagree with this - I've seen complaints that Bioware takes way too long to make class changes, what with the same classes remaining overpowered in PvP for months, and I can't exactly disagree with that, but I wish those kinds of changes were achieved with more subtle number tweaking instead of sweeping class overhauls.

The point is that I like knowing how my class works and being good at it. I was not happy when I realised during my first ops after Shadow of Revan's release that I was doing it all wrong, since the latest set of class changes had made it so that I needed to use certain abilities in the opposite order in which I had used them before. And that's just on my main! I have alts of all advanced classes, and there the changes tend to feel even worse. If I could barely remember how to play a character in the first place, the next patch turning everything on its head only makes it even harder and more frustrating.

18/09/2015

I have decided to make this series a bi-weekly feature (in the meaning of "once every two weeks", that is - what a confusing word). With my posting frequency that means that posts like this will come up quite often compared to "regular" ones, but who's to say that I can't spend a large chunk of time talking about flashpoints? It's still on topic.

After talking about an Imperial-only flashpoint two weeks ago, I thought I would cover a Republic-only flashpoint next. I decided to go for The Esseles (pronounced "ess-EL-ees", except for that one random line in the middle of the flashpoint where they suddenly call it "ESS-el-es" for no reason).

General Facts

The Esseles is the very first flashpoint that Republic players will encounter, meant to be completed immediately after you've left your starting planet, though it's optional. You're told to proceed from the fleet to your faction's capital, and you can either go there directly or embark on an adventure on the way by taking the Republic transport Esseles. The Empire's equivalent is The Black Talon.

When you're a new player and you do this flashpoint for the first time, it seems absolutely amazing compared to the way dungeons work in other games. There are so many NPC conversations, and there's so much story! You get to make choices, and they influence what happens (not dramatically, but still)! It could be a complete paradigm shift for MMOs! Shortly after SWTOR's launch I nominated the Esseles for the Piggie Awards 2011 and it won! Anyone remember those?

Then you do the other flashpoints in the game, and they are all more or less like your typical MMO dungeon: kill some bosses, get some loot.

If you then make it to endgame, where at level fifty the Esseles was one of the hardmodes you had to run to gear up, you may even have ended up hating it, because while you just wanted to get it done to get your reward, there were all those conversations to go through that you'd heard a trillion times before. Tensions were heightened even more if you were grouped with someone who actually wanted to watch it all again instead of space-barring. This is another thing that I expect to make a comeback with Knights of the Fallen Empire's new flashpoint scaling.

Story (spoilers)

I feel that with how important story is in this flashpoint, I need to talk about that first:

It was just supposed to be a
routine ride to Coruscant. But a blue Twi'lek in the lounge of the passenger transport Esseles warns you that it looks like Imperials are
on the ship's tail. Officially the Republic and the Empire are still
supposed to be at peace, but of course the moment you say that, the ship
comes under fire. The captain dies in the initial attack (you kind of wonder why, considering his body lies in the middle of a wide expanse of open space) and you make it
to the bridge in time to see first officer Haken struggle to not
panic.

A certain Moff Kilran demands that you hand over an individual
that has been working against the Empire and that his spies tell him is aboard your ship. You repel the Imperials' first attempt to board the
Esseles and find out that the blue Twi'lek from earlier is who they
are after. Her name is Asara and she is a Republic ambassador trying to
get Imperial worlds to secede from the Empire.

As it
turns out, while you were busy holding off one group of Imperials, another
managed to get to the bridge and has taken over. You detour via engineering
to find out how to unlock the bridge. The engineers there are trapped
behind a forcefield and it is brought up that there is a way to open the
bridge that would also vent the compartment they are in. Asara urges
you to sacrifice the engineers for the greater good and you can go along
with it or find another, slightly longer way to get to the bridge without getting the engineers killed.

Once
there, you defeat the last Imperial boarders and hatch a plan to board
your attackers instead to deactivate the tractor beam that holds the Esseles in place. Asara is supposed to accompany your assault team. Once she's out
of earshot, first officer Haken suggests that you leave her behind
at the end of the mission to give the Imperials what they want and
discourage them from giving chase again.

You board the
enemy ship, disable the tractor beam and even fight a Sith apprentice on the way.
Before leaving, you have the option to tell Asara to stay (she won't
fight you) or tell her about the plot against her without going through
with it. You return to the Esseles and the ship makes a successful
escape. First officer Haken is either pleased with the outcome if you
left Asara behind, embarrassed if you took her back with you but didn't
tell her about the plot, or in trouble if she's with you and does know.
You either return to the fleet or continue to Coruscant.

Fights
The Esseles is all about fighting off Imperials (plus some Mandalorians), and most of them are not particularly impressive, even though they used to hit very hard in the level fifty version. (We'll see how that works with the new scaling.) I think the low difficulty is down to the Esseles' low-level version having been designed to be the first tactical flashpoint - before tactical flashpoints were an actual thing - as it was intended to be doable by people who didn't even have their advanced class yet, so that tanking and healing abilites might literally be unavailable.

The bosses are all very straightforward, but I guess that is appropriate for an instance that may well be many players' first experience with group content in the game. Lieutenant Isric, who leads the first boarding party, teaches players about frontal cones and add spawns. Ironfist summons adds and fires missiles. Then there's that droid that does a knockback - which may not sound like much at first but can easily get a newbie killed, since the fight takes place above a typical Star Wars chasm with no safety rails. (There's also a proper "chasm boss" later, where you have to jump down a shaft and can die if you don't make sure to bounce off some pipes on the way.)

The bonus boss, another droid, is at least interesting in so far as he's the only boss I can think of that actually requires two players to be activated, as doing so requires two consoles at opposite ends of the room to be clicked at the same time. Annoying for soloers, but kind of neat as a group experience. (Wonder if they'll change that in Knights of the Fallen Empire?)

This bonus boss is also the only boss I'm aware of that had his mechanics completely turned on their proverbial head at one point. At launch he would occasionally go through a phase where you had to run away from him because he would do a lot of damage to everyone in melee, too much to heal through it really. But then at some point Bioware decided to completely reverse this mechanic, so now being in melee is safe and range has to come close instead whenever he enters his dangerous phase or take lots of damage at a distance. [/fun fact]

The last boss, Sith apprentice Vokk, basically teaches players that standing in purple circles is bad. A very important lesson. However, he also just feels cool because he receives a lot of build-up and the game makes a big deal out of the fact that you're meeting a Sith for the first time - unlike later content, where both Sith and Jedi quickly turn into just another type of cannon fodder.

Conclusion

In my opinion every player should play through the Esseles at least once, ideally with a friend. You may or may not like the story it tells, but it's worth seeing for no other reason than that its delivery is really unique in the MMO space. It's not just the various choices, but this flashpoint also shows the group conversation system at its best. The Esseles is the only place I know of where group conversation options can actually play off each other a little - e.g. when you meet the Sith at the end and a Jedi in the party starts talking to him about how the dark side is evil, a smuggler can reply with a disparaging comment about force users and their crazy beliefs. (If she wins the roll, that is.) It's the closest thing to a true multiplayer RPG that I've ever heard of.

Unfortunately producing content like this either turned out to be too costly, whether in terms of time or money, or Bioware realised early on that it wasn't going to mesh with the WoW-like dungeon grinder they were in the process of building, which is why all the other flashpoints that followed are so much more like traditional MMO dungeons.

Even as I re-ran the flashpoint for this article to take some more screenshots - at level twelve where you might meet some players genuinely new to the game, so that you would expect people to be considerate of that - I ended up with other players shouting in caps lock about how everyone needs to skip the cut scenes and even initiating vote kicks when some of us didn't hit space bar, which of course completely ruins the experience. I suppose that the solo mode coming in KotFE will address this... but at the same time soloers will miss out on some of the Esseles' unique charm, which just can't be recreated without other people there.

14/09/2015

While I was trying to come up with a title for this post and eventually settled on putting "saying goodbye to NiMs" in there, I realised that I never commented on the piece of news which came out of Gamescom and announced the "real" goodbye to NiMs: Bioware stating that they won't bother creating nightmare modes for any new operations going forward. I didn't really see anyone else talk about it either. Not even a quick scan of the Dulfy comments on that post revealed any outrage about it. I guess it's because that comment only served to confirm what a lot of us had already been expecting for a while. (Except for a certain guildie of mine, who was convinced that despite of the difficulty of ToS and Ravagers hardmode, it would be no trouble for Bioware at all to add another difficulty on top of it. We told him that he was nuts.)

If operations take up too many development resources relative to how many people play them, taking out the top difficulty makes the most sense. Progression raiders can't even complain about that right now because ToS and Ravagers hardmode were already more difficult than some previous nightmare modes anyway, so it's not as if players weren't being challenged. It was the middle-of-the-road guilds that ended up with the short end of the stick this tier, facing a wacky progression curve that made it hard to stay motivated. We will see if Bioware addresses this whenever they release their next new operation. Either way, nightmare mode going away was a surprise to very few of us.

"With the changes we are making in Fallen Empire,
all Operations will now be at max level, this means the differences
between Hard and Nightmare EV and KP, just don’t stack up against the
difficulty differences found in other Operations," he continued. Awesome, I thought - does that mean they'll be updating these to include some new mechanics? Nope. Instead they'll simply remove them so that all the remaining nightmare modes will be at least roughly on par.

That wasn't what I would have hoped for, but I can hardly claim to be upset either. Of course it helps that I've had three and a half years to run this content over and over again, so that I maxed out all my Eternity Vault and Karagga's Palace achievements ages ago. But to anyone who might be worried about missing out: Well, first off you still have the chance to run these now, as they only require a small group by now and are ridiculously easy with players being ten levels higher. But more importantly, Musco speaks the truth. EV and KP NiM are really exactly the same as on story and hard, only with higher numbers. No actual "content" is being removed here. If you've never been, feel free to watch this 2013 video of mine summarising a guild run of both KP and EV NiM (warning: some foul language):

The lesson here is: 1) People in my guild are silly. 2) There really isn't anything in there that you won't still also be able to see on the lower difficulties.

The other piece of news that Musco shared with us is that major changes are coming to conquests. Several events will have their personal targets lowered (though not Total Galactic War), but most importantly, crafting will be turned into a one-time bonus. My gut reaction is that this is a great change, even if I'm not sure if my small guild will ever be able to make it onto the scoreboard again with no crafting. My days of finishing a Total Galactic War with six characters having hit their target are certainly over.

But really, it was not a very exciting way of playing. Being able to accumulate oodles of points for a minimal time investment was just way overpowered. Now you'll have to actually play to hit your target, always. I've heard people say that this will make it even harder for small guilds to achieve a place on the scoreboard, but I'm not so sure about that. What it really does is cut down on the advantages of having lots of alts and being rich, and I see no reason to assume that people with those attributes are more likely to be in a small guild than in a large one. Big guilds have also had people crafting for silly amounts of points. And well, when it comes down to having more active players, bigger guilds have always had an advantage. Either way, I'm curious to see what sort of scores we'll actually see on the conquest board after this change. I'm pretty sure that the times of guilds finishing with ten million points or more are over.

Even if I think that the proposed changes sound good for the game overall, I doubt that they will really do much to alleviate my own conquest fatigue. With no new incentives I don't think that I will suddenly start working on my personal target with more gusto again, but I've heard that in KotFE one of the rewards will be rare crafting materials that you won't be able to get any other way, which would certainly be exciting. Personally I also think that they should look into adding more repeatable PvE objectives. But mostly I'm just happy to see that they are still paying attention to conquests and trying to improve them, even if activities like this are not going to be their main focus in the upcoming expansion.

10/09/2015

I have a level 11 Sentinel that has spent the past year sitting on Ord Mantell, waiting for a friend I was supposed to play with to come back. This week I finally logged onto her and took her back to the fleet. It was time to move on, and I've had plans for her for ages: I've been meaning to replay the Jedi knight story for a long time and I still don't have a Sentinel at max level. However, I also wanted to use this opportunity to tell the sad story of her friend that never came back, because it shows how easily a game can be ruined for you by starting off on the wrong foot.

There's nothing sadder than being the only remaining half of (what was supposed to be) a levelling duo.

For the purpose of this story, let's call my friend Cuddles (not his actual name). Cuddles is an Englishman in his forties, married with no children and always very busy with work. In some ways he's the stereotypical "modern gamer" that MMO developers talk about when they argue that they need to make more content that can be completed in short, bite-sized chunks. I originally met him in World of Warcraft but we stayed in touch even after I stopped playing that. He tried out SWTOR at launch and even bought a collector's edition, just in case he'd end up liking the game. However, his interest quickly evaporated - I believe that the last time I saw his Shadow logged in was when he was levelling on Tatooine.

Two years later, he suddenly decided to give the game another try. I can't remember why, but I'd like to think it was because my blog posts about it were so awesome. We talked about classes and I said that the consular takes some time to get going. As he couldn't access his old account anymore, he decided to create a new one and rolled up a trooper this time. Not being someone to do things in halves, he immediately subbed up for two months... and then hardly played during that time, because he was always too busy.

Finally we agreed on a date when we would spend some time playing together. I had rolled up my new Sentinel specifically for this purpose. After finishing Tython, I took her off to the fleet for all the various bits and bobs such as choosing an advanced class (pre-discipline system) and picking up crew skills. I figured that Cuddles would have completed the starter planet by the time our play date came around and we could then be able to do the Esseles together. It was going to be awesome!

Once the actual day rolled around however, Cuddles' trooper was still only level nine and still busy on Ord Mantell. No problem, I thought, we can do the heroics on Savrip Island together! No, actually he was about to go into the volcano base for a bunch of quests. Also fine by me, I just wanted to play together in some fashion. I invited Cuddles to a group and made my way over to the right area on Ord Mantell. I was baffled to see him die over and over again. I vaguely recalled having some challenging encounters in the volcano base as a new player, but nothing that bad!

When I finally reached him, I could see why. He wasn't really healing up enough between fights, but more importantly his rotation consisted of hammer shot, hammer shot and more hammer shot. I asked him why he wasn't using some of the better abilities he'd already got, and I believe he said they were too expensive? He hadn't really groked the way the ammo system worked at all. There was also something about the way plasma cell could trigger a dot and how he thought that this meant that he should be using hammer shot all the time... I don't remember the details, only that it made some twisted kind of sense if you really wanted to look at it that way. I felt a bit embarrassed as I explained to him that he was doing the WoW equivalent of trying to kill everything with auto-attack. It's not like he was a stranger to MMOs or gaming in general! He was even more embarrassed than me I think.

Anyway, he knew what to do now and we proceeded inside the volcano together. With my Sentinel already having her advanced class and her first companion, we made short work of everything. However, with how many mobs and quests are in there, we were still busy for half an hour so. Since Cuddles had already been playing for a while before that point, he was starting to feel tired. I tried to encourage him - there was only one quest left, his class quest!

I was really looking forward to how that would go. Without spoiling much (even though I think that spoilers are not as much of an issue for the story on the starter planets), it's safe to say that the trooper story on Ord Mantell ends with a twist. We entered the phase for the last quest he had left, and I got ready to watch the cut scene. How would he react to the big revelation? I was so excited. However, only a few seconds in I was booted out of the cut scene. I can't remember off the top of my head, but we probably killed some mobs and I was scratching my head in confusion. What had happened? Next thing I knew, Cuddles was already back in Fort Garnik. I don't remember the exact words of our conversation, but it's fair to paraphrase it like this:

Me: "What just happened? Why are you already back in Fort Garnik?"
Him: "I was getting really tired and just wanted a cup of coffee, so I simply space-barred through this last conversation."
Me: ...
Me: "But didn't you want to know what happened? It was the class story, no less!"
Him: "Same as usual, obviously. I saved them, everybody thanked me, blah blah etc."
Me: !!!

I awkwardly explained to him that this wasn't what had happened at all and brought up the option of resetting the mission so that he could see what had actually happened... though of course that would have meant fighting his way back to the inside of the volcano base. Unsurprisingly, he didn't choose to do that. He was super bummed, logged off and never came back to the game (though he's still my friend, luckily).

Even if I've decided to take my Sentinel to new places now, this story will always stick with me, because it shows how opaque even simple things can seem to a completely new player, and how a couple of badly timed mistakes can completely suck the fun out of the experience before you've even had time to properly get into the game.

07/09/2015

All three of my level sixty Republic healers now have full sets of Dark Reaver gear, hurrah! I won't pretend that this is some great achievement, considering how easy Bioware made it to get PvP gear after 3.3's price reductions. But it was a goal that I had set myself, so I'm pleased to have reached it.

I've been doing slightly less PvP again lately, as my bucket list and a general desire to blow the dust off some low-level alts has reinvigorated my interest in questing. However, warzones are still unbeatable when it comes to passing a bit of time after a long day of work, when I don't have the mental capacity to pay attention to a story anymore. That's not to say that PvP is mindless, but it just doesn't tax my brain in quite the same way, you know?

The general feel of the warzones has largely been the same as always, sometimes fun, sometimes nasty. I see a lot of people complain about having PvE-geared players on their teams, which always makes me mad. PvP gear doesn't grow on trees, you know? And no, you can't expect people to have started at level ten. Are those who are only just starting out now supposed to play in their undies? That's not optimal anymore, you know. I should really be more outspoken about that. I'd hate to imagine people turning away from PvP purely because they receive such a rude welcome when they take their first steps into warzones.

The only thing that has seemed odd to me is that I've been getting what feels like tons of arena matches lately. I know that random numbers are random, but it's really been quite noticeable, to the point where I found myself wondering whether Bioware quietly tweaked the weighting of the numbers to make arena pops more frequent. I'm half tempted to start recording which maps I get and whether I win or lose, the way I did back in autumn 2013, just to see if there's any truth to it. However, back then I had a lot more time to play - I don't think I'd be able to knock out a hundred matches in only three weeks these days.

PvP story of the month (which actually happened a couple of weeks ago already): I'm sure we all know that feeling of having a personal nemesis in a warzone. If you're a dps, maybe there's a particularly squishy player on the other team whom you like to chase whenever you see his name come up. If you're a healer like me, there'll be games when someone decides to attack and harass you from the first second you meet until the end of the game. It can be annoying, but it's part of the game.

What I hadn't experienced before was that someone made it oddly... personal. Specifically, there was this Marauder in a Hypergates match that kept coming after me even when it seemed to serve no tactical purpose anymore and kept talking to me in /say about how he just wanted my love, our love was eternal etc. It was kind of funny, but also sort of awkward since I didn't know him at all and you never know what kind of weirdo you might have just run into. I was kind of glad that he whispered me from a Republic alt after the
match, which served to reassure me that it had just been a silly bit of fun.

Also, I keep meeting this guy in warzones. After the third time or so I whispered him to ask him what in the world had possessed him to name his character after Joffrey Baratheon of all people? (For those who don't know, he's one of the most outright despicable and unsympathetic characters in Game of Thrones/ASOIAF.) He never replied.

04/09/2015

Recently I've been thinking about adding a regular feature or column to this blog. I've seen other blogs do it, and if you choose a subject that suits you, it gives you something to write about on a regular basis even when you're short on inspiration for posts about current events. After some deliberation, I've decided on introducing... Flashpoint Fridays! It won't be a weekly column (because at my posting frequency that would result in every other post becoming a Flashpoint Friday entry), but I haven't decided yet whether I'll turn it into something that comes up every two weeks or less often. We'll see. The point of these posts will be to talk about individual flashpoints and what makes them great.

For my first Flashpoint Friday I've decided to post about a flashpoint about which I've apparently never posted before on this blog: the Imperial-only Boarding Party.

General Facts

Boarding Party is the first of the two mid-level "Revan flashpoints" on Imperial side. (The Republic has its own two faction-specific flashpoints, which tell the first half of the story.) In the low thirties you can pick up a quest on the fleet called "Call to Arms", which asks you to first complete Boarding Party, and then the follow-up flashpoint The Foundry. The gist of it is that the Emperor "allowed" an unknown, powerful Jedi master to escape from his clutches (/cough), and his trail has led the Empire to the Foundry, an extremely powerful installation which is currently in Republic hands. Of course the Empire can't let that stand, but since the Foundry is so powerful, any attack on it will have to be sneaky. You need to steal a Republic ship, which you can then use to infiltrate the Foundry. This is what Boarding Party is about: You're off to board the Republic cruiser Dorin's Sky.

Fights

The trash mobs in Boarding Party consist of random Republic soldiers, droids, and a bunch of Jedi. You kind of have to wonder why the Dorin's Sky has so many (not even particularly competent) Jedi on board! None of them really stand out as noteworthy. About the most interesting thing that can happen with the trash during a pug run is that someone accidentally knocks a mob down into the pit located about halfway through the flashpoint, which then ends up pulling a bunch of mobs from below.

Back when the level fifty hardmode of this was endgame, it wasn't surprising that a lot of people liked to skip as much trash as possible. There is one section in particular where this involves some jumping however, and I pretty much always fail on that one and end up pulling. I fully expect this behaviour to make a comeback once this flashpoint is scaled up and becomes relevant endgame again.

The boss fights are a mixed bag, with some slightly boring ones and a couple more interesting ones. On the more boring end we have the first boss, a droid that zaps people with electricity, and Lieutenant Menerus, who is so forgettable that you could almost miss the fact that he is a boss. "Storm Squad" at the end is also pretty tank-and-spank, though it's clearly beneficial to kill them in what I would say is the logical order (meaning first the medic, then the security chief, then the big guy).

What makes the other fights a bit more interesting is that they try to challenge the group's ways of dealing with crowd control and kill order. Major Alvena comes with two droid adds which are best CCed until she'd dead, because they spawn additional adds when they die, which can wreak a considerable amount of havoc if it happens at a bad point in the fight. Jedi master Do'nair appears to have a similar gimmick in the form of two Jedi healers, however if you start off by CCing them, he will immediately free them at the start of the fight. He also has super stealth detection and hits like a truck, so it can be beneficial to try to just burn him down quickly and then deal with the two healers afterwards. If your dps is decent, they won't stand a chance of keeping him up.

The most interesting encounter in my opinion is the bonus boss, which is why I'm always sad when people don't want to do it. It's about stopping the ship's power core from overloading and involves killing the ship's chief engineer and his two powerful droid guardians while generators overload all around you, hurt people and knock them back. Again the fight encourages you to deal with the problem of adds in a different way, as this time the adds will enrage if you try to kill the boss first, so you're better off focusing them first. This is definitely one of the more challenging low-level boss encounters.

Story (spoilers I guess?)

The story is pretty straightforward - you board the ship and fight your way to the bridge to take over. What is notable is that the ship's Togruta captain keeps sending troops after you with gusto, until she finally threatens to blow up the ship rather than letting it fall into Imperial hands. Not exactly endearing, but personally I can hardly blame her under the circumstances. I have however found that a lot of Imperial players seem to find her extremely annoying and can't wait to get to the bridge, where they have the option to choose the conversation option "Someone shut this woman up", which causes one of your soldiers to knock her out with the butt of his rifle.

"Is this some great victory to you?" - Captain Yelto and crew

At the end you also get to choose whether to take the crew prisoner or shoot them. I always feel bad when my party chooses the latter option, because there is this sad shot of two of the Republic crew members holding each other's hands before they get killed.Conclusion

No matter which faction I'm playing, I always try to make sure to do the two "Revan flashpoints" on each new alt, even if I'm not really taking said character into instances otherwise. It's no wonder that this is one of the flashpoints to which Bioware will add a solo mode in KotFE, because it's a story you don't want to miss. It just gets a bit tedious when you're grinding this at max level because the trash mobs are quite numerous and not particularly interesting.

Note: Writing this post actually reminded me once again how much I miss having a comprehensive database for the game. TORCommunity is working on theirs, but it's still pretty bare-bones and there is no section for NPCs for example. After I had written the first draft of this post, I actually realised that I hadn't paid enough attention to all the bosses and their abilities the last time I was in the instance to be able to remember them all. Since I didn't have a good site to look things up, I ended up re-running the flashpoint purely to gather more information for this post. Life's hard when you actually have to do your own research!

I actually meant to write about the Makeb weekly when it first came out, but then I rarely ever did it because it was so boring and eventually I kind of forgot about the whole thing again. It is still worth writing about however, simply because of how unusual it is.

Most good daily hubs give you a bunch of quests which you can complete in short succession since they are all in the same area or at least close to each other so that they can be done in one circuit of the map. By those standards, Makeb was a terrible daily hub. The staged weekly would only allow you to pick up one quest at a time, and it would be long and annoying to boot, often requiring you to traverse a whole new mesa and kills dozens of mobs. Once it was finally completed and handed in, you'd be allowed to pick up one other quest... and then had to repeat the whole thing six times to complete the weekly.

The question I always asked myself was: Why? It seems like a very odd design choice, unless you're intentionally trying to draw out the questing as long as possible, even at the risk of boring your players. To this day I can only guess what Bioware wanted to achieve with these dailies, and I suspect that the crucial hint lies in the aforementioned achievements. Certain quests would unlock other missions, and doing them in a specific order would unlock various achievement steps. From their description, it sounds like they are supposed to tell a story. It seems to me that the idea behind the Makeb weekly was to create a set of dailies that would tell a story, and one that would be slightly different each week based on the player's picks.

It actually sounds like a cool idea in theory, but the implementation just didn't work out. The "stories" were so bare bones as to be almost non-existent and there was no clear indicator of which quests were connected or even that they were supposed to be connected at all. I did the staged weekly this past week, following TOR Community's guide to unlock "endings" I hadn't seen yet, and there was just no obvious logic to which quests were connected. A quest about the local mercenaries was supposed to be followed by one about the Imperials on Makeb, then another one about the mercs. The ending had nothing to do with the Imps, yet you'd never reach it without that random mission focused on them in the middle. Why? Without a guide, it pretty much would have come down to trial and error.

So I can definitely see why Bioware wants to clean this content up. It was obviously an experiment, and not a very successful one. It didn't succeed in telling any real stories, and people just avoided doing the Makeb dailies because they took ridiculously long compared to any other daily hub and felt terribly unrewarding. I was actually surprised to see some players express annoyance about the change in the official forum thread, but as Wilhelm always says, such is the rule of MMOs - it doesn't matter what you change, it will have been someone's favourite feature.

While I'm not a huge furniture collector, I'm planning to get myself those achievements before 4.0 simply because I know that this content is going away and even if I approve of the coming changes, I want to see it one more time as it was.

I don't think that trying to make a set of dailies with a changing story was a bad idea, but I think Bioware has learned a lot since Makeb. Bounty Contract Week is a good example of how to mix things up on a daily basis and make each day a little bit different, even if it achieves the variation through RNG instead of player choices. Also, Bounty Contract Week's different story steps flow smoothly from one to the next so that you can complete the whole chain in half an hour instead of spending over an hour hopping back and forth between different locations.

Search this blog

Subscribe

Referral Link

Thinking about trying SWTOR for the first time or coming back after some time away? If you use this referral link of mine, you'll get some free goodies! If you end up (re)subscribing, I'll get something too, but if you don't... well, no harm done!

Here's a page with general information about the referral program on the official website, and here's their FAQ if you want to know more. (Note in the small print that referrals can only be processed if you opt-in for promotional e-mails on sign-up.)